Technology seems to be dominating our culture these days. Likewise, some of the people that are making (and convincing us to buy and use) all of this technology, like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Marissa Mayer, seem to be everywhere. But, in the grand scheme of things, how culturally significant are techies, as compared to artists and athletes and politicians and other types of people? Based on a new project from MIT, it turns out that tech folks still don't resonate with everybody quite as much as you may think.

Pantheon is a new project by the Macro Collections group at MIT's Media Lab, whose goal is to collect, analyze and visualize datasets "that can help us understand the process of global cultural development." You can now browse the first big dataset they've assembled of thousands of the most globally well-known people through history. The website provides lots of ways to look at the data, from simple charts ranking people by their cultural significance, to data visualizations of which countries and professions have produced the most people with cultural impact.

They provide a description of the data and their methodology, which you can review for the gory details. In a nutshell, they looked at the 11,000 or so people who have Wikipedia profiles in at least 25 different languages. The researchers then developed a Historical Popularity Index (HPI) score for each person, which is based heavily on the number and distribution of pageviews of that person's Wikipedia bio across languages. The higher one's HPI, the more significant one is globally.

So, where are the techies on this list? Well, computer scientists made up only 0.5% of the most well-known people born since 1900. Looking through the entire list of people, Bill Gates is the top tech person on the list but, in general, tech's big wigs don't seem to have as much cultural impact as you might expect. Here's where Gates and other big tech names land on the list (I looked for both people tagged as computer scientists and business people in the tech world):

Bill Gates #97

Alan Turing #377

Steve Jobs #597

Tim Berners-Lee #1072

Paul Allen #1324

Linus Torvalds #1831

Larry Ellison #2052

Steve Ballmer #2853

Grace Hopper #3094

Larry Wall #3258

Eric Schmidt #3575

Larry Page #3894

Mark Zuckerberg #4169

Guido van Rossum #4191

Sergey Brin #4230

Michael Dell #4345

Timothy Cook #4485

Jerry Yang #4850

John Carmack #4981

Jeff Bezos #5087

Of course, this whole exercise is essentially arbitrary, and these data are based on Wikipedia, so take it all with a grain (or handful) of salt. But, still, I find it to be well thought out, pretty rigorous and, above all, very interesting. Despite the huge impact companies like Microsoft and Apple have had across the globe, the people most identified with those companies, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, are far less culturally significant, at least using this metric, than the guy who starred in Kindergarten Cop, Conan the Barbarian and Twins, Arnold Schwarzenegger (#56).

The Pantheon researchers point out that they will be constantly revising and updating their results, so maybe this will change over time. I would expect that techies will become more well-known and more culturally significant as the years pass. They may have a hard time, though, ever surpassing the global popularity of the Terminator.